SurfSecret Cleans Most Traces, Leaving Important Ones Behind

 The system requirements mentioned for the Privacy Protector are only 1 MB of RAM and less than 1 MB of HDD space on a system running MS Windows 95 or above.

Computer Used to Test the Privacy Protector: The system I used had 512MB of RAM and 80 GB HDD space. The operating system used was MS Windows XP, Service Pack 3.

Download and Installation: Installation of the program was easy. It hardly took two full minutes to install the software. There are two options: The first one was to install the software for everyone and the second one was to make it available only for the current user. As it was only for testing purposes, I selected the “current user” option. There were no other clicks apart from this and the usual destination folder confirmation and EULA agreement. The rest of the process was automated.

Download Accelerators not Allowed? It seemed that the webpage from where I tried to download the demo was not allowing any Download Accelerators. I had Free Download Manager (FDM) installed on the machine. Whenever I tried to download the SurfSecret Privacy Protector using the accelerator, I found that the FDM could download only the PHP page (the webpage containing link).

Assuming that FDM was not functioning well with the webpage, I tried to use my other laptop that had Internet Download Manager. The IDM could only download the PHP file instead of the actual page, same as FDM. Coming back to the previous laptop, I disabled the FDM before I could download the software to the local HDD using a normal Internet Explorer’s download feature.

Note: I am not sure if it happened only to me but it seemed that the webpage for download of SurfSecret Privacy Protector was not accepting any Download Accelerators, not IDM or FDM at least. You may try using other download managers and if you also encounter the problem, you can simply turn off the download manager to use your browser's download feature. However, the problem with using a browser's download feature is that if something goes wrong, you often have to re-start the download.

One of the features to consider before buying SurfSecret Privacy Protector is the Stealth Mode feature. As you can always clean your computer when you finish the tasks you want remove history of, I do not think that the feature is actually required. It performs some real-time cleaning, but the cookies and temp files are stay on the computer as long as you are on the webpage or application. If someone is bent upon checking your usage by interrupting you, he will still find the temporary files that reveal information about what you were doing.

Under such circumstances, Stealth Mode isn't as stealthy as one would hope. It is useful only for those who may forget to clean the computer after using it. A perfect analogy would be the Incognito mode offered in the Internet Explorer 8 that is not used by the majority of people using the browser.

After running Privacy Protector, I ran another program to clean the computer again. To my surprise, I found that the data pertaining to MSOFFICE and OE was still there. Initially, I thought that I might have not selected the options related to MSOFFICE. However, when I checked the Third Party Software Tab, I found that MSOFFICE was not listed there. This means that SurfSecret Privacy Protector does not give you the option to clean up traces of your Outlook and MSOFFICE use.

Another drawback of privacy cleaner is that the program does not give you a preview of the files to be deleted when you click on the Clean Now button. This may cause deletion of an important file if you are not very careful while selecting the options before you run the program.